WI-FI, as a widely applied wireless communications technology, has advantages of fast deployment, being convenient to use, and a high transmission rate, and is widely applied to various industries. Access points of WI-FI networks are deployed across places such as hotels, cafes, schools, and hospitals, and it can be said that WI-FI is everywhere in life.
Although WI-FI networks are increasingly popular, WI-FI network setup is complex, and therefore, equipment vendors still need to invest a large quantity of support costs to help users establish WI-FI networks and resolve problems during using the WI-FI networks. Among users who have successfully set up wireless networks, 60% to 70% of the users still do not configure any security parameter, and the networks are easily attacked. To resolve confusion of users when they use wireless networks, the WI-FI ALLIANCE has put forward WI-FI PROTECTED SETUP (WPS) specifications, also referred to as WI-FI simple configuration (WSC), which intends to simplify operations when a user sets up a wireless local area network (WLAN) such that users who know little about wireless settings and security can also set up secure WLANs easily and conveniently, and can add devices to the networks conveniently.
Main application scenarios of the WPS are: 1. initial WLAN setup, which refers to establishing a WLAN for a new access point (AP) using a configuration device, 2. adding a new device to a WLAN after the WLAN is established.
The WPS standard provides three configuration manners, a personal identification number (PIN) manner, a push button control (PBC) manner, and a near field communication (NFC) manner. The PIN manner refers to that a user enters, on a register, a PIN code of a device to be configured. The PBC manner refers to that a user presses push buttons almost at the same time on a register and a device to be configured. The NFC manner includes three means: 1. directly transmitting configuration information by means of NFC, 2. transmitting, to a configuration device by means of NFC, a password of a device to be configured, and 3. performing connection handover by means of NFC, and exchanging, by two parties, Diffie-Hellman (DH) public key hash values.
However, in the PIN manner, a PIN code needs to be entered manually, which is relatively complex and not secure. In the PBC manner, although an operation is easy, the PBC manner cannot resist active attacks. The NFC manner requires that all devices have NFC interfaces, which is of relatively low universality. In addition, in the WPS, verification is performed using eight messages M1 to M8. The messages are of a wide variety and complex, a requirement on a processing capability of a terminal is relatively high, and configuration efficiency is low. Moreover, bandwidths of out-of-band channels (that is, other channels except a WI-FI channel) of both devices that need to be configured are limited, and during a configuration process, interaction messages are of a wide variety and complex, or an interaction message has excessively large content, which also leads to low configuration efficiency.